I have two different WD external My Book drives (slightly different models_ connected to a late 2013 iMac running Sierra, and both drives appear to function normally during the day. Every morning I wake up to a notification that tells me that Time Machine has failed on one of the two My Books (with the last successful backup occurring before midnight). Then, if I go into either My Book, they both appear to be completely empty. (Sometimes a few folders will show up, but they’ll be empty of files/sometimes nothing at all shows up.)
WD Utilities will not run on the drives at this time. Unplugging them does not resolve the issue. Sometimes the drives show up multiple times in Disk Utilities. Only a full system restart resolves the problem, which then recurs overnight.
I have an external Seagate drive attached that does not suffer this problem.
As far as I can tell, my WD drivers are current.
This feels like a dangerous problem that I don’t want to have repeated every night for infinity on drives that are supposed to be protecting my files.
Is there anything I can do about this besides replacing these drives with non WD-drives from now on? I purchased one of these drives a mere week ago to replace another one that I THOUGHT was failing, but was probably suffering from a similar issue. While I currently have three drives attached, I actually have five drives total, as I’ve been trying to sort through this issue: three wd, one lacie (part of wd, right?) and one seagate, and the ONLY one that’s working is the seagate.
Yes, it goes to sleep. However, I have forced the mac to sleep during the day and the drives still show their files after I wake it up, so sleep mode doesn’t inherently bug out the drives – does something different happen if it’s asleep for several hours that doesn’t happen if it’s asleep for short durations?
I can try with one drive tonight, but I’m pretty sure that method has already failed, as this was going on before I added the other new my book.
Yesterday I updated Sierra from 10.12.3 to 10.12.4 and installed the
Mountain program (supposed to manage external drives or something).
The end result:
Upon trying to wake the sleeping iMac this morning, the screen changed
to a different shade of black but the computer never fully woke up.
Instead, I got the spinning beachball of death and had to force-restart
the whole system.
The external drives did stop working as well (last night, most likely
some time between 1am and 2am, as that’s when there were no more time
machine updates).
I disabled Hibernation in terminal and it worked one time. In the morning, the drives were not empty. However, that technique has not worked the following three days, despite my re-adding the same codes in terminal.
Does anyone have any other ideas on how to make Sierra stop ejecting/emptying WD drives while not affecting the Seagate drive?
